ence, which with occasional absences was their home for fourteen
years. Mrs. Browning died there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning
left Florence some time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to
Italy, never returned there. He lived again in London in the winter, but
most of his summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany.
About 1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which
continued with rare exceptions to the end of his life. There in 1888
his son, recently married, had made his home; and there on the 12th
of December, 1889, Robert Browning died. He was buried in Westminster
Abbey on the last day of the year.

[Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING.]

'Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,' Browning's first published poem,
was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of the time
of life at which he wrote it,--very young, full of excesses of mood, of
real exultation, and somewhat less real depression--the "confession" of
a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the ever-new discovery of
his own nature, its possibilities, and its relations. It rings very
true, and has no decadent touch in it:--

"I am made up of an intensest life
... a principle of restlessness
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all--"

this is the note that stays in the reader's mind. But the poem is
psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy--except as all
beginnings are so; and Browning's statement in a note in his collected
poems that he "acknowledged and retained it with extreme repugnance,"
shows how fully he recognized this.

In 'Paracelsus,' his next long poem, published some two years later, the
strength of his later work is first definitely felt. Taking for theme
the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer, alchemist,
conjuror,--compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of truth-seeker,
charlatan, and dreamer,--Browning makes of it the history of the soul of
a feverish aspirant after the finality of intellectual power, the
knowledge which should be for man the key to the universe; the tragedy
of its failure, and the greater tragedy of its discovery of the
barrenness of the effort, and the omission from its scheme of life of an
element without which power was impotent.

"Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed,
I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind.
Power--I could not take my eyes from that;
That only I tho